Gently Polaris set the animal down on the ice, and relaxed the grim hold on his throat. With great gasps Boris took into his lungs once more the life-giving air. The man snaked in the long whiplash. Waiting a few moments until the great dog's senses had fully returned, he took a yard of the thongy tip of the lash and laid it smartly across the flanks of Boris, not cruelly, but with sufficient sting to make the punishment tell. The other dogs trotted uneasily about, sniffing, whining, and eying their fallen leader. Presently Polaris stood up, turned his back deliberately on Boris and walked a few steps from him, still holding the whip. He called the dog to come to him. The huge animal arose, shook himself, glanced shamefully at his mates, stretched himself, tossed his head with a snort, and followed after the man. Polaris bent down and patted his shaggy head, with a word of encouragement. At his touch, the brute trembled slightly, but the man's voice was reassuring, and the whip hung idle. Boris rubbed his head against the knee of Polaris and whined. He had found his master, and he knew it. Other dogs might, and did, turn on Polaris again, but Boris never. One by one, the other brutes learned their lesson of obedience, learned that they served a wise and vigilant master, and gave in to the lash and the harness. Soon the man was able to take them far afield, and crossed the floe to the east for a number of long runs. On the twenty-ninth day from the firing of the first lyddite blasts, the stout _Minnetonka_ shook her sides clear of the drift-ice from the last channel, and shot southward into free water. Picking up the miners and Polaris and his team, Scoland pointed a course some three miles from the eastern shore, and the cruiser tore on under forced draft, so continuously that the canny MacKechnie shook his gray head many a time and oft over the depletion of coal-bunkers. "'Tis all varra weel, the gettin' on in such haste," he grumbled, "'but, ma certes, 'twill be a long, weary drive back again, and coal doesna grow on icebergs." Several days of clear going gave all on the ship opportunity to take much needed rest, after the perils and labor that had racked both minds and bodies. Spring and spirits returned to jaded men, and it was an eager and hopeful crew that cheered to the echo on the day that Polaris shouted from the bridge: "Steer the ship in to the left. Yonder is a point of land that my eyes remember well, and behind it a harbor that marks the end of this journey, I am certain." It was the rocky promontory across which his own ship of ice had been broken, nearly two years before. Inland, to the north, extended the looming barrier range, which he had sought in vain to pass. Polaris and old Zenas Wright stood on the bridge as the cruiser rounded the headland. The young man clapped the geologist on the shoulder, and pointed up the snow-covered slope, that led from the cove to the foothills beyond.