Hildegarde had won her father’s consent, reluctant though it was, that she should go ashore with Cheviot. Gaily she assured him it was little compensation enough to a girl who had foregone the fearful joys of Nome. The visit of inspection to the Polaris claims would not take long. As the old man looked at his “two children,” with the sunshine on their faces, he wondered who would have the heart to steal from them a single one of those early hours of enchantment. Not Nathaniel Mar. But neither he nor they had bargained for Reddy’s bearing them company. He announced his intention unmistakably, when Cheviot went over the ship’s side into the small boat that was to take him and Hildegarde through the surf. Mar tried in vain to quiet the beast. So unnerving were Mr. Reddy’s demonstrations, when he saw Hildegarde preparing to follow Cheviot, that Mar called out, Hildegarde must wait till the dog could be shut up; the sailors could hardly hold him. But the men below, bobbing about on the rough water, were with difficulty preventing the boat from being battered against the ship’s side, and Cheviot was shouting, “No time to worry with the dog!” At the same moment, Hildegarde, hanging suspended between her two counselors on the swinging ladder, saw a big wave sweeping askew the boat beneath her. From above her father, and Cheviot from below, called out “Hold tight,” while Louis supplemented the vain efforts of the two other men, unable by themselves to steady the clumsy craft in such a sea. But Hildegarde, with a conviction that Reddy, escaping out of a sailor’s arms, was in the act of coming down on her head, jumped from the ladder and landed in the boat with the dog and a twisted ankle. Instantly she called up to her horrified father, “I’m all right, and so is Reddy.” Whereupon the boat was swung out into open water. They had gone half a mile before Cheviot discovered something was amiss. “Nothing the least serious,” she said, though it would be serious enough for her if she were cheated of the two or three hours’ wandering at Louis’s side on this heaven-sent morning through the wild, sunshiny land across the surf. Cheviot was for turning round at once and taking her back to the steamer, but that would be to prolong by a mile a sufficiently difficult transit. He would send her back after the boat had landed him. “No, no,” she pleaded. “If I can’t walk, I’ll wait for you on shore.” But Cheviot was giving the sailors directions about getting her safely back to the _Beluga_.