arms--which he did,
sacrificing his left shirtsleeve to cover them. The change and the food
stopped its crying for a while, and Rowland lay down with it in the warm
boat. Before the day had passed the whisky was gone and he was delirious
with fever, while the child was but little better.

CHAPTER IX

With lucid intervals, during which he replenished or rebuilt the fire,
cooked the bear-meat, and fed and dressed the wounds of the child, this
delirium lasted three days. His suffering was intense. His arm, the seat
of throbbing pain, had swollen to twice the natural size, while his
side prevented him taking a full breath, voluntarily. He had paid no
attention to his own hurts, and it was either the vigor of a
constitution that years of dissipation had not impaired, or some
anti-febrile property of bear-meat, or the absence of the exciting
whisky that won the battle. He rekindled the fire with his last match on
the evening of the third day and looked around the darkening horizon,
sane, but feeble in body and mind.

If a sail had appeared in the interim, he had not seen it; nor was there
one in sight now. Too weak to climb the slope, he returned to the boat,
where the child, exhausted from fruitless crying, was now sleeping. His
unskillful and rather heroic manner of wrapping it up to protect it from
cold had, no doubt, contributed largely to the closing of its wounds by
forcibly keeping it still, though it must have added to its present
sufferings. He looked for a moment on the wan, tear-stained little face,
with its fringe of tangled curls peeping above the wrappings of canvas,
and stooping painfully down, kissed it softly; but the kiss awakened it
and it cried for its mother. He could not soothe it, nor could he try;
and with a formless, wordless curse against destiny welling up from his
heart, he left it and sat down on the wreckage at some distance away.

"We'll very likely get well," he mused, gloomily, "unless I let the fire
go out. What then? We can't last longer than the berg, and not much
longer than the bear. We must be out of the tracks--we were about nine
hundred miles out when we struck; and the current sticks to the fog-belt
here--about west-sou'west--but that's the surface water. These deep
fellows have currents of their own. There's no fog; we must be to the
southward of the belt--between the Lanes. They'll run their boats in the
other Lane after this, I think--the money-grabbing wretches. Curse
them--