nheated
sleeping-room, drawing on an extra pair of thick woollen stockings in
preparation for his customary outing.

"It is foolishness. Four times already have you been over the ground
without finding it. A long brass-halted knife could not have been
overlooked if it had been there. I tell you that you lost it among the
rocks of the hollow, and that you would be wise to give it up."

Sigurd's answer came in muffled though emphatic tones, for he was
huddled almost out of sight among the furs on the chest, as he waited
for his companion to complete his dressing. Now that genuine winter
weather was upon them, the loft was necessarily abandoned as a sleeping
apartment; but it still served as a dressing-room for such slight and
speedy alterations as were attempted.

As he pulled on the big heelless skeeing-shoes, Alwin sighed anxiously.
"I must find it. Any day Leif may miss it and ask."

"He is not likely to, since he has already gone a week without noticing
its absence. And if he should, you have only to say that you borrowed it
to protect yourself from wolves. That will not be much of a lie, Skroppa
being nearer wolf than human. He will feel that he was wrong to have
denied you a weapon, and he will only scold a little."

"It is true that he is in a good temper again," Alwin admitted.
"Yesterday I heard Tyrker tell Valbrand that many more chiefs had asked
concerning Christianity; and last night, after Eric had gone to sleep in
his seat, I heard Leif say to Thorhild that if now he could only do some
great deed to prove the power of his God, it was his opinion that half
of Greenland would be ready to believe."

Sigurd crept out of the bearskins with a shiver. "I say nothing against
that. But let us end this talk. My blood-drops are so frozen they rattle
in my body."

He thumped down the steps as though rigid with cold, and jumped and
danced and beat his breast before he could bring himself to stand still
long enough to fasten on his skees.

"Where shall we go, then?" Alwin asked, as they glided out of the gate
in the dim light of an Arctic winter day. "It may be that to go over
that road again might become a misfortune. Once I saw Kark looking after
us with a grin which I would have knocked off his face if I had not been
in a hurry."

Sigurd instantly faced toward the snow-crusted hills that lay between
them and Eric's Fiord. "Then to-day it will be useful to go in another
direction, so that any suspicions he ha