Two hundred miles to the north and east, three men were gathered on the snow crust in a little valley, wrenching and thrumming at the wires and pinions of the first bird-machine that ever had penetrated into the fastnesses of the antarctic. All was taut for the start. The wings were set. The engines responded to the power. The propeller thrilled the air. Into the seat climbed a lean, fur-clad young man, with a thin face, high cheek-bones shadowing deep-set, cold, blue eyes, and a wisp of drab moustache above thin, eager lips. "Ready there, Aronson," he said, to a man standing by. A second later Captain James Scoland sailed majestically away into the white mystery of the unknown polar land. At the door of the snow house that had been their home for days, Aronson and Mikel, who had pressed with him to his farthest south camp, watched his going with shaded eyes. A tiny silken flag bearing the stars and stripes, fluttered from one of the canvas plane wings. Mikel watched it as far as it was distinguishable. "An' here's hopin' he carries Old Glory safely through to the pole--an' back again!" he shouted. Leagues farther to the north, in another tiny camp, three other men were waiting, also. Still farther on, in an ice-locked harbor, the good ship Felix rode day by day, the little company of its crew watching the slow passing of the hours, with every ear attuned to catch the first voice returning from the south that should tell of success, or of defeat and death. And were that tale of success, those on the ship nursed a heavy sorrow, that would turn into bitterness all the glory of success. A glorious maid and two men who had been of their company had strayed from the ship and perished in the wilderness. * * * * * Silence. As far as the eye could reach, a dull wilderness, stretching wearily under a leaden, sunless sky. A rolling plain of lusterless snow, cut sharply here and there by crevasses, gashed at intervals by rifts of unknown depths and tortuous gulleys. North and south seemingly without bounds; east and west, many a mile of bleak fatigue between low, sullen hills of gray. A land without sound, without life, and without hope. Yet, among the ridges in that dead and twilight chaos, something stirred. A dark speck crawled on and on, writhing along the brinks of the crevasses, skirting the yawning rifts, twisting in and out around the hummocks, like the course of some wriggling vermin across the cracked and gaping skin of a white, unholy corpse.