“But we didn’t call ourselves arctic explorers, and we never once said Pole—not even after we reached the edge of the ice-pack, north of Sannikof Island. It wasn’t till we got into north latitude 78° that we called a council of war. By that time we knew our men and they knew us. We were sure of six, but we put it to the other four as well. We engaged to extricate the ship from the floe and send her home, if any man of them wanted to turn back. What were Borisoff and I going to do? one of the doubtful four asked. Well, we had our famous steel launch, and we had sledges, dogs, kyacks, provisions, and—we had—an idea we’d like to see what it was like—_farther on_. I’ve always believed our not saying anything about ‘a dash,’ or so much as naming the great goal, gave Borisoff’s words their most compelling eloquence. If we’d said then that we wanted to try for the Pole, some one would have felt himself obliged to object and talk prudence. As it was, we twelve sat there as one man in the little saloon of the _Narwhal_, with the loose ice grinding against the ship’s sides. And no one said, but every one was thinking, ‘We’ll find the Pole.’ Borisoff was a born leader. Not a soul on the ship but believed Borisoff would do anything he set out to do. They all knew by now how extraordinarily well equipped we were. Borisoff showed again and again how we should profit by the failure of our forerunners. Well, that was in September. We were frozen in, and we drifted with the ice all that winter and following summer—drifted in the dark, with bears prowling round the ice-shrouded ship—drifted in the midnight sun with guillemots and fulmars circling about our rigging.” He sat there some seconds staring through the peat wall, never seeing the open watch, forgetting the irrevocable hour. As though she, too, shared in some chill vision, the dog shivered. To bring the master back, “Ky is cold,” said Hildegarde, and would have thrown over her a trailing end of blanket. “No, no, she’s not cold _here_,” the sick man answered, but in a voice so faint and far Hildegarde wondered if he would ever speak again. To mask her creeping fear and bridge the silence, “Why does she shiver, if she’s not cold?” His absent eyes came slowly back to where the dog was uneasily dozing. “Thinks we’re crossing the ice-moraines, thinks she can’t go on, then remembers the whip. The whip that flies out when you least expect it, eh, Ky?—and bites the hair off clean.” He bent forward, and gently laid his distorted hands on the scarred and trembling hide. The dog was quiet again. “That first winter,” he went on, “one of our men was killed by a bear, and one died from a natural cause. He would have died at home. Early in the summer came the day when the ice gripped us. Our tough ship might have been an egg-shell. But we were ready.” “You had to abandon her?”