Lucius Davoren takes no heed of this frivolous talk. He is lying on the floor of the log-hut, with a large chart spread under him, studying it intensely, and sticking pins here and there as he pores over it. He has ideas of his own, fixed and definite, which neither of his companions shares in the smallest degree. Hossack has come to these wild regions with an Englishman’s unalloyed love of adventure, as well as for a quiet escape from the trusting relatives who would have urged him to go up for Divinity. Schanck has been beguiled hither by the fond expectation of finding himself in a paradise of tame polar bears and silver foxes, who would lie down at his feet, and mutely beseech him to convert them into carriage-rugs. They are waiting for the return of their guide, an Indian, who has gone to hunt for the lost trail, and to make his way back to a far distant fort in quest of provisions. If he should find the journey impossible, or fall dead upon the way, their last hope must perish with the failure of his mission, their one only chance of succour must die with his death. Very shrunken are the stores which Lucius Davoren guards with jealous care. He doles out each man’s meagre portion day by day with a Spartan severity, and a measurement so just that even hunger cannot dispute his administration; the tobacco, that sweet solacer of weary hours, begins to shrink in the barrel, and Geoffrey Hossack’s lips linger lovingly over the final puffs of his short black-muzzled meerschaum, with a doleful looking forward to the broad abyss of empty hours which must be bridged over before he refills the bowl. Unless the guide returns with supplies there is hardly any hope that these reckless adventurers will ever reach the broad blue waters of the Pacific, and accomplish the end of that adventurous scheme which brought them to these barren regions. Unless help comes to them in this way, or in some fortuitous fashion, they are doomed to perish. They have considered this fact among themselves many times, sitting huddled together under the low roof of their log-hut, by the feeble glimmer of their lantern.