“Joslin says so. He had a letter at Seattle from a man who’d come down to Nome from Polaris over the ice at Christmas. Not that it matters much. The sick feller don’t seem to have let on to them others. Anyways, they’s good and plenty in the Mother Lode. What I don’t see is how he managed it.” “Managed what?” “To hang on. If ever I see death in a man’s face! But I always said they wusn’t like anything I ever seen before.” “What wasn’t?” “_Them eyes._” “Near Nome, is it—the place where he—” “Oh, no, a good ways north.” “Heavens, north even of Nome?” “Yes, it’s the farthest north camp they is. Think o’ him hangin’ on all through the winter. In that place!” Blumpitty’s pale gaze sought vainly for enlightenment among the moving ice masses. “People do get through in worse places than that,” said his companion. “They ain’t no worse places than Polaris.” “Yes, there’s Franz Josef Land.” “Never heard o’ that camp.” “I wish _I_ were going as far as Polaris.” “Why, come right along.” She laughed. “I only wish I could. I’d like to know a man who’d lived in the farthest north camp of all—the farthest on our side. What’s that?” “Where?” “Out there.” She pointed to a ghostly something, faint as smoke against the high light of the ice rim on the far horizon. Blumpitty stared. “Reckon it’s a cloud. They’s two more! And another. No, by gum, it’s ships!” And ships they were, five of them, the first seen since leaving Vancouver!—spectacle to stir the chilled blood of watchers on the _Los Angeles_. For these dreamlike apparitions were vessels such as theirs, threatened like them with ice-pack and with storm. A detachment of the Nome fleet! None came any nearer, except the _Ohio_ and the little _Charles Nelson_. They spoke and passed, the Ohio speedily to vanish; _Charles Nelson_ to tack about, hunting an outlet, and then, discouraged, turn south as the bigger _Los Angeles_ pushed valiantly through the ice to the North. “Turn back! No use!” _Charles Nelson_ warned, and then, quicker than ever you saw in your life, the fog swooped down and wiped everything off the ocean except the nearer ice. The _Los Angeles_ turned and tacked about to the tune of the fog-horn, trying to find a way through the heavier floe, only to be headed off by bigger masses looming through the haze, majestic slow-sailing ice-ships, some like white gondolas, some like sturdy, low-built castles set fantastically on a field of fleece, for the exposed parts of the berg had rotted in the sun, and in the wind been rippled, so that a nearer sight showed the surfaces honeycombed, disintegrate. And again to Hildegarde Mar came that sense of its all being familiar, as though she had been here before. So she had, in spirit. With a thrilling sense of recognition she discovered the original of more than one picture in that book of Galbraith’s that she and Bella had pored over in their school-days.