Hearing Cheviot’s short laugh, Gillies jerked his head angrily over his shoulder. Hildegarde hesitated at the top of the companionway. “It looks like a dreadful breach of discipline,” she said, “but it isn’t. You told me I might come again.” “In here, then,” said Gillies gruffly, and took them to his room. He was shaking like one in an ague, but he seemed not so ill pleased to see some one from the world below. He gave the girl a chair. “It’s all right,” he said. “Only it’s no good for others to see you up here.” He fell into the remaining seat with a heavy thud, and his bullet head hung forward. “Well?” he demanded, with a forced laugh, turning bloodshot eyes on Cheviot. Hildegarde saw plainer now what an unnatural color Gillies was. Did the shivering and the purple and scarlet stains mean a sickening for fever, or only a horrible anxiety and an all-night watch in the cold? “I’m afraid you didn’t get much sleep,” she began. “Not for two nights now,” he said, and then looking at Cheviot: “This’ll be all over the coast, from Nome to ’Frisco.” As he spoke the hard face twitched. “What will?” Cheviot answered. “That the floods have made a new bar in Norton Sound this spring?” The captain uttered an inarticulate sound, something between a grunt and a groan. “First trip, too! Ship full of damned newspaper people. Land rats, starving for a story.” He choked, and stood up stamping his cold feet, and while he did so, through the port he forced the sleep-defrauded eyes to reconnoiter the sharp, white outline of the distant icebergs. “There are people on board who’ll get the story right,” said Hildegarde. “Oh, I don’t care! Let ’em say what they like—if only the wind doesn’t bring the floe down on us again.” Cheviot made a move as if to go. “The trouble is,” said Gillies, “I’m short of hands. However hard they keep at it those China boys can’t shift five hundred tons of coal before the tide’s flood.” “Well, you’ve got a lot of white men on board—” “Yes,” growled the captain, “and a lot of help I’ll get out of them.” “What I came up for”—Cheviot drew nearer—“was really to tell you there are men on board this ship who propose to stand by you.” Gillies, leaning against the locker, neither said nor looked a syllable of thanks. Never even took his bloodshot eyes off the ice line. But the hard face twitched again. A sense of the devouring anxiety he was obviously laboring under made the girl quick to relieve him of any added strain or restraint that he might feel in an unfamiliar presence at such a crisis. Even Louis might be thinking “a woman was in the way.” She stood up, murmuring an excuse for going. The captain, unheeding, went on in that hoarse, muffled voice: “I’ve just sent an officer below to see if I can get some volunteers.” “What officer?” said Cheviot. “Not the first?”