lacked six hours to daylight. If they waited, the dogs would not
freeze, but men might suffer, and perhaps lose their lives.

But the rugged pair from Cape Norman said that in the preceding fall
someone had put up a "tilt"--a log refuge--in the woods near by. They
roved about until to their exceeding joy they found it.

There was not merely a shack of spruce-logs. In the shelter there was
a stove, and beside the stove was a pile of wood. It is the habit of
the men of the North to think of those who come after them. They who
have been through a winter understand what it means to depend on
others and have others depend on them. Those who do not play the game
that generous, open-handed, far-sighted way have no friends and are
despised by their neighbors.

The dogs fell asleep in the snow. One of the Cape Norman men "bust
open" the river with his axe and filled the kettle for tea. But even
while Grenfell was fussing with the knots of the dunnage bag to get
out the tea and the sugar, he heard his comrade's pipe fall to the
floor.

Grenfell looked up. The good soul, standing erect, was fast asleep. It
had been sixty hours since he had slept, and forty-eight of these had
been spent on that terrible trail where there was no trail. Flesh and
blood rebelled at last. Even the records of ambulance-drivers in the
war have seldom equalled such endurance. The sleeper was roused and
put on the bench. He tried again to stuff his pipe with his frightful
rubbish called tobacco. But the pipe clattered to the floor again: he
was dead to the world: his snoring shook the peace of dreamland, and
would have broken the glass in the tilt if there had been any glass to
break.

What might be called dawn came at last, but with it the snow returned
fast and thick as the flies and mosquitoes of a Labrador spring.

The snow cut off their view of the sea, but they heard it roaring as
though possessed of all the devils.

Over that roaring there seemed to come to their ears again the still
small voice of the woman in misery--hopeful, waiting for them,
trusting the Doctor who had never failed her yet.

They were not the sort who would say sea-ice was impassable, if humans
and dogs could traverse it.

But examination showed that there was no way over the partly frozen
sea.

Greatly against their will, they must take the roundabout route
overland. By two in the afternoon the ice held sufficiently to let
them cross to Crow Island, and there they