To the east a plain stretched away toward the hills and the mountain wall--a plain rifted deeply with many gulleys and chasms, but passable. They found with little difficulty a break in the rocky rampart that fringed the bank of the cove where the sledge might be landed, and there Polaris left the girl and the dogs. He leaped onto the drift ice with a wave of his hand and set out across the cove for the point, marking as he went the safest and easiest course for his return with the sledge. Rose Emer watched him cross and ascend the sloping side of the point. A moment later he reappeared, dragging the sledge, and launched it on the return trip. He disdained to lighten the load of it, in which manner he might have made his transport much more easily in two journeys. Leaping from one large cake of ice to another, he hauled and pushed and dragged the entire load. Where dangerous intervals of small ice lay between the larger pieces, he crossed over, and with a heave of his magnificent shoulders pulled the sledge quickly across. What ten men might well have hesitated to attempt he accomplished with seeming ease. He was more than half-way across the cove when the attention of the girl was distracted from him by a disturbance of the ice near the cove's mouth. Where there had been little motion of the drift ice she saw several of the fragments pitched suddenly from the water, and as they fell back she thought she glimpsed beneath them in the water the passing of a large, dark body. As she wondered the ice was thrown violently aside in half a dozen places, and in the eddying water she saw the rudderlike fins and lashing tails of a school of some sort of monsters of the sea. They were headed in the direction of the laboring man. She called a warning to him, but in the midst of the grinding of the drift and the noise of his own exertions he did not hear it. With no warning the danger was upon him. He had dragged the sledge to the center of one of the larger cakes of ice, and paused to select his next objective. There was a rush in the water under the ice, the drift was parted suddenly, and a monstrous head with open mouth and a terrifying array of gleaming tusks rose dripping from the gap. Over the edge of the man's floating footing this dread apparition was projected, a full eight feet of head and giant body thrust out of the sea in an attempt to wriggle onto the ice cake. The big flake of ice, perhaps fifteen feet across, tilted from the water under the weight of the monster, and it seemed that the man and sledge would be pitched straight into the yawning maw. Then, with a clash of disappointed jaws, the head was withdrawn, the monster sank from sight, and the ice raft righted. Rose Emer sank on her knees in the snow. Around her crouched the dogs, yelping, baying in fury at the sight of the diving danger. "Ah, Heaven help him!" she gasped. "The killer-whales!" * * * * *