hundred other scrapes
into which they had got and from which they had somehow always escaped
unharmed; and even of the lonely grave on Itigailit Island, and the
cairn of stones he had built upon it.
"A tragedy brought me into the country," he said to himself, "and a
tragedy has taken me out of it, and the end of my life will be a
tragedy."
And then, after long thought:
"Skipper Ed says our destiny is God's will. But God always has a
purpose in His will. I wonder if I've fulfilled my destiny, and what the
purpose of it was. Maybe it was just to be a son to Father and Mother."
He mused upon this for a long time, and then his thoughts ran to Skipper
Ed and Jimmy:
"I wonder what there is in Skipper Ed's life that he's never told us,"
he pondered. "He's always said he was a wandering sailor-man, who stopped
on the coast because he liked it. He never was a common sailor, I'm
sure. I never thought of that before! Sailors aren't educated, and he
is! And whenever Jimmy or I asked him to tell about his own life before
he came here he always put us off with something else."
And then he fell asleep to dream that he and Skipper Ed were walking
under strange trees, with flowers, the like of which he had never seen,
blooming all about them and making the air sweet with their perfume.
CHAPTER XXVII
A STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
It was fortunate that Bobby had selected the center of the floe for his
night shelter, for when he awoke in the morning and crawled out of his
snow cavern he discovered that the unstable shore ice of which the floe
was composed had been gradually breaking up during the night into
separate pans, and that he was now upon a comparatively small floe,
little more indeed than a large pan, which had originally been the
center of the great floe upon which he went adrift.
Surrounding him was a mass of loose pans, rising and falling on the
swell, and grinding and crunching against one another with a voice of
ominous warning. With quick appreciation he was aware that his position
was now indeed a perilous one, for it was obvious that his small remnant
of floe was rapidly going to pieces.
But another and more sinister danger threatened him, should he escape
drowning. Bobby was ravenously hungry. He had eaten nothing since the
hasty luncheon of sea biscuit and pork on the night he and Jimmy parted.
He had been terribly hungry the day before, but now he was ravenous and
he felt gaunt and weak. As
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