th his lean face furrowed.

"We must have been with them two years--but I don't quite know. It was
all the same up yonder--ever so far to the north."

It seemed to Wyllard that he had seldom heard anything more expressive
in its way than this sailorman's brief and fragmentary description of
his life in the wilderness. He had heard from steam whaler skippers a
little about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation
frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing
beyond the mosses ever grew. It was easy to understand the
brain-crushing sameness and monotony of an existence chequered only by
times of dire scarcity on those lonely shores.

"How did you live?" he asked.

"There were the birds in summer, and fish in the rivers. In winter we
killed things in the lanes in the ice, though there were weeks when we
lay about the blubber lamp in the pits. They made pits and put a roof
on them. I don't know why we stayed there, but Jake had always a
notion that we might get across to Alaska--somehow. We were way out on
the ice one day when Jim fell into a crevice, and we couldn't get him
out."

He broke off, and sat still awhile as one dreaming. "I can't put
things together, but at last we came south, Jake and I, and struck the
Kamtchadales again. We could talk to them, and one of them told us
about a schooner lying in an inlet by a settlement. The Russians had
brought her there from the islands, and she must have been a sealer.
Jake figured it was just possible we might run away with her and push
across for the Aleutians or Alaska."

Charly looked up suddenly. "She--was--a sealer--Hayson's _Seminole_.
I was in Victoria when we heard that the Russians had seized her."

Wyllard turned to Overweg, who nodded when he asked a question in
French.

"Yes," he said, "I believe the vessel lies in the inlet still. They
have used her now and then. It is understood that they were warranted
in seizing her, but I think there was some diplomatic pressure brought
to bear on them, for they sent her crew home."

Then Lewson went on again. "Food was scarce that season, and we got
most nothing in the traps," he said. "Besides, there were Russians out
prospecting, and that headed us off. We figured that some of the
Kamtchadales who traded skins to the settlements would put them on our
trail. When we went to look for the boat she'd gone, but we hadn't
much notion of getting off in her, th