n make it back to the American shore," he exulted.
"Rover, old boy, get back on your job. We're going to the islands."

Hopefully he hurried forward. But they had tarried too long, for, not
a hundred rods from their starting point, they came upon a broad, dark
break in the floe, such a break as no draw-bridge of ice would ever
span.

"And, like the other, it's endless," Phi groaned as his eye swept the
line from left to right and from right to left again; then he sat down
to think.

A half hour before this Lucile had said to Marian: "Listen, I think I
hear a dog bark."

They listened and the bark came to them very distinctly.

"Is it Rover, or does it come from the island?" asked Lucile.

"I can't tell," whispered Marian.

For some time they listened. When at last they prepared to resume
their journey, Lucile glanced upward again. Then a cry of
consternation escaped her lips; the fog had thickened; the stars were
lost to them. They were again adrift on the trackless floe without
compass or guide.

At the moment when Phi sat down to think, they were just coming in
sight of that same break in the floe, on the side of which he sat.
They were not a mile apart, but the distance had as well been a hundred
miles as, in this labyrinth of ice-floes, no person finds another, and,
as it turned out later, Phi took the trail to the left and they the one
to the right.

Why the two girls chose to travel to the right along the break, they
could not have told, nor why they traveled at all, unless because
motion quieted their nerves and served to allay their fears. Perhaps
there was something of Providence in it. Certainly it did bring them a
bit of good fortune.

Lucile had rounded a gigantic ice-pile when suddenly she gripped
Marian's arm.

"What's this?" she exclaimed.

A brown object lay some distance ahead of them. With bated breaths
they crept cautiously forward; it might be a white bear or walrus.

Suddenly Marian threw up her head and laughed. "It's only a kiak.
Some Eskimo has left it on the ice and the floe has carried it away."

"May be a valuable find. Let's hurry," exclaimed Lucile.

Breaking into a run, they soon reached its side.

"Let's explore it!" whispered Marian. "You take the forecastle and
I'll take the after-cabin," she laughed, as she thrust her arm into the
open space toward the stern of the kiak.

"Why, there is something there!" she exclaimed.

"Something here, too!" answered