n fingers, and more from falling
spirits.

Sometimes I heard them saying (in voices that were intended to be loud
enough for me to hear) it would have been better to have built winter
quarters on the north of Darwin and settle there until the return of
summer. And at other times I heard them counting the distance to the
Pole--a hundred geographical miles, making twenty days' march at this
season, with the heavy weights we had to carry, and the dwindling of our
dogs and ponies, for we had killed a lot of them for food.

But I would not give in, for I felt that to go back without finishing my
job would break my heart; and one day when old Treacle said, "No use,
guv'nor, let's give it best," I flew at him like a hunted tiger.

All the same I was more than a bit down myself, for there were days when
death was very near, and one night it really broke me up to hear a big
strapping chap saying to the man who shared his two-man sack, "I
shouldn't care a whiff if it wasn't for the wife and the kiddies."

God knows I had my own anchor at home, and sometimes it had a devil of a
tug at me. I fought myself hard, though, and at last in my desire to go
on and my yearning to go back to my dear one, I made an awful proposal,
such as a man does not much like to think of after a crisis is over.

"Shipmates," I said, "it isn't exactly my fault that we are here in the
middle of winter, but here we are, and we must make the best of it. I am
going forward, and those who want to go with me can go. But those who
don't want to go can stay; and so that no one may have it on his
conscience that he has kept his comrades back, whether by weakness or by
will, I have told the doctor to serve out a dose of something to every
man, that he may end it whenever he wants to."

To my surprise that awful proposal was joyfully received; and never so
long as I live shall I forget the sight o' O'Sullivan going round the
broad circle of my shipmates in the blue gloom of that noonday twilight
and handing something to every one of them, while nobody spoke, and
Death seemed to look us in the face.

And now I come to the incident for which I have told this story.

I could not get a wink of sleep that night for thinking of the brave
fellows I had doomed to death by their own hands (for that was what it
came to), because their souls were starving and they were thinking of
home.

My soul was starving too, and whether it was the altitude (now 11,000
ft.) that w