rouble. The Aleut dies, an' I lose my ship. But I was
close enough to get the reckonin' of that island.

"Finally I land at Seattle, broke. I meet up with the man they call
Hardluck Simms. Also they called him Honest Simms those days. Some said
his honesty accounted for his hard luck. I like him, an' I finally tell
him about my island. I put up the reckonin', an' he supplies the
_Karluk_, grub, an' crew.

"Simms' luck is still ag'in' him. The _Karluk_ gits into ice, gits
nipped an' carried north, 'way north, with wind an' current, frozen
tight in a floe. It looks like we've got to winter there. Mind ye, I've
given Honest Simms the reckonin' of the island. We go out on the ice
after bear, though the weather's threatenin', for we're short of meat.
An' we kill a Kadiak bear. Me--I'll never stand for the shootin' of
another bear if I can stop it.

"I've bin havin' trouble with my eyes. Right along. I'm on the floe not
eighty yards from Simms. No, not sixty! It was me killed the bear, an'
we're goin' back to the schooner for a sled. I stayed behind to bleed
the brute. All of a sudden, like it always hits you, snow-blindness gits
me, an' I shouts to Honest Simms. I'm blind, with my eyeballs on fire,
an' the fire burnin' back inter my brain.

"Along comes a Point Arrow blister. That's a gale that breeds an' bursts
of a second out of nowhere. It gathers up all the loose snow an' ice
crystals an' drives 'em in a whirlwind. Presently the wind starts the
ice to buckin' an' tremblin' like a jelly under you, splitting inter
lanes. You lose yore direction even when you got eyes. I'm left in it by
that bilge-blooded skunk, blind on the rockin', breakin' floe, while he
scuds back to the schooner with his men. That's Honest Simms! Jim Lund's
left behind but Honest Simms has the position of the island."

"I didn't hear you call out you were blind, Lund. The wind blew your
words away. I didn't know but what you were as right as the rest of us.
The gale shut us all out from each other. We found the schooner by sheer
luck before we perished. We looked for you--but the floe was broken up.
We looked--"

"Shut up!" bellowed Lund. "You sailed inside of twenty-four hours,
Honest Simms. The natives told me so later, when I could understand talk
ag'in. D'ye know what saved me? The bear! I stumbled over the carcass
when I was nigh spent. I ripped it up and clawed some of the warm guts,
an' climbed inside the bloody body an' stayed there till