elf.
Billy and I laid hands on Muir without a word, and in a trice he was
stripped of his wet garments, rubbed dry, clothed in dry underwear,
wrapped in a blanket and set down on a bed of spruce twigs with a plate
of hot chowder before him. When the chowder disappeared the other hot
dishes followed in quick succession, without a question asked or a word
uttered. Lot kept the fire blazing just right, Joe kept the victuals hot
and baked fresh bread, while Billy and I waited on Muir.

Not till he came to the coffee and strawberries did Muir break the
silence. "Yon's a brave doggie," he said. Stickeen, who could not yet be
induced to eat, responded by a glance of one eye and a feeble pounding
of the blanket with his heavy tail.

Then Muir began to talk, and little by little, between sips of coffee,
the story of the day was unfolded. Soon memories crowded for utterance
and I listened till midnight, entranced by a succession of vivid
descriptions the like of which I have never heard before or since. The
fierce music and grandeur of the storm, the expanse of ice with its
bewildering crevasses, its mysterious contortions, its solemn voices
were made to live before me.

[Illustration: GLACIAL CREVASSES

"We had to make long, narrow tacks and doublings, tracing the edges of
tremendous transverse and longitudinal crevasses--beautiful and awful"]

When Muir described his marooning on the narrow island of ice
surrounded by fathomless crevasses, with a knife-edged sliver curving
deeply "like the cable of a suspension bridge" diagonally across it as
the only means of escape, I shuddered at his peril. I held my breath as
he told of the terrible risks he ran as he cut his steps down the wall
of ice to the bridge's end, knocked off the sharp edge of the sliver,
hitched across inch by inch and climbed the still more difficult ascent
on the other side. But when he told of Stickeen's cries of despair at
being left on the other side of the crevasse, of his heroic
determination at last to do or die, of his careful progress across the
sliver as he braced himself against the gusts and dug his little claws
into the ice, and of his passionate revulsion to the heights of
exultation when, intoxicated by his escape, he became a living whirlwind
of joy, flashing about in mad gyrations, shouting and screaming "Saved!
saved!" my tears streamed down my face. Before the close of the story
Stickeen arose, stepped slowly across to Muir and crouched do