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"Your friends are holding high carnival, and I wonder not that you long to be with them, 'stead of carrying vain messages in a lost cause. But for this damned floe of ice you 'd have had your wish this very night." A hundred rods brought the rider within sight of the cross-road at Yardley's Ferry, just as a second horseman issued from it.
The men managed to save some seal meat which had been cached in a drift near the gangway. They lost the flagstaff, which had been rigged as a wireless mast out on the floe, but drew in the aerial. The ship was floating now amid fragments of floe, and bumping considerably in the swell. A fresh southerly wind blew during the night, and the ship started to forge ahead gradually without sail.
We ran close up, only two or three hundred yards away, and steamed parallel to the floe, until it ended towards night and we saw to our infinite satisfaction the last of the icebergs and the field fading away astern. Many of the rescued have no wish ever to see an iceberg again.
The light had been so suddenly and surprisingly flashed upon my face as I lay sleeping, and the hat that had been blown ashore by the wind from over Graden Floe, were two speaking signals of the peril that environed Clara and the party in the pavilion. It was perhaps half-past seven, or nearer eight, before I saw the door open, and that dear figure come towards me in the rain.
In such circumstances, the dog with his keen sense of smell, and his compass with its unerring finger, were equally useless. "Nothing to do but wait," he mumbled, so he sat down patiently to wait. And, as he waited, the snow-fog settled down over all. It was with a staggering sense of hopelessness that the two girls on the bosom of the Arctic floe saw the snow-fog settle down.
In about five minutes they reached the large boat; but all saw at a glance that little less than a miracle was needed to carry them safe ashore. The snow was falling thick and fast, the wind driving it in eddying clouds, and amid it could be seen at times the white caps of the increasing surges as they broke on the edge of the floe.
It was on this ice that Annatock was employed; and his countrymen would fain have gone to warn him of his danger, but a gap of thirty feet already separated the floe from the main ice, and although they could perceive their friend in the far distance, busily employed on the ice, they could not make their voices heard.
I done tol' him you might be back to-day an' den ag'in you mightn't 'pended on de way de ducks was flyin'. Spec' he'll be roun' ag'in purty soon seemed ter hab sumpin' on his min'. I'll tu'n de knob, sah. Yere git down, you imp o' darkness, you Floe! you Dandy! Drat dem dogs!
Returning to the old berg, the party took down the shooting-box from the top of the cave, and filling it with the remaining boughs, and a part of the seal-skins, blubber, &c., regained the floe, and unloading the box, placed it as a roof on the new dwelling.
At this very moment, on another section of that same vast floe, Phi lay flat on his stomach, his eye traveling the length of his rifle barrel. His brow was wrinkled. He moved uneasily, as a gambler moves who would risk all on one throw of the dice but does not quite dare. He shook the benumbed fingers of his right hand, then gripped the rifle once more. His forefinger was on the trigger.
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