Northward, ever northward, the blot dragged its crooked way. Nearer would it resolve itself into two wearily plodding beasts, tugging, slipping, stumbling, but going on, the creaking straps of their leathern harness pulling a sledge with a heap of skins upon it. Still nearer--a fur-clad, haggard man with hollow blazing eyes glittering through an unkempt shock of golden hair and a gaunt gray dog with drooping tail picking their way with soundless feet through the white reaches, dragging their sledge; like a fantasy passing across the white and silent dream of the cold end of the world. Once the dog had looked up into the face of the master, the dumb eloquence of sacrifice shining through its eyes, an age-old fire. The massive jaws slipped apart, but closed again; only a sigh was breathed from the beast's broad chest. "Aye, Marcus, I know," muttered the man. "I know that you'll die on your four feet, if you can, and in the straps. And I, Marcus," his voice dropped to a whisper, "I'll die, too, Marcus, as you will--for the Rose--all for the Rose--But not yet, Marcus; for the Rose yet lives, and death is slow for the very strong." Five luckless days had passed since the priest had laid his burdens by. One by one the cruel south had taken lives in toll, until only Polaris and the grim pack leader stood in harness to race with death on the course to the north. First polar bears, made mad by hunger, attacked the party, and two of the dogs, Juno and Nero, died under the sweeping crescent claws. A nameless distemper, from which no dog, however carefully bred, is quite immune, had seized both Hector and Julius. For hours they acted strangely as they ran, and then, at a stopping place, they went quite mad and turned on the man and girl. Hector went down to silence under the crushing jaws of Marcus, who rose with a mighty roar to quell this insane mutiny; and Julius died on the spear of Polaris. There were tears on the cheek of the man as he drove the weapon home. Refashioning the harness to suit his own wide shoulders, Polaris then took up the work of the lost dogs. For two long days of many marches he and Marcus had dragged the sledge. Now, with their stock of provisions dwindled away and their rations slender, the terrific strain of the journey was telling almost to madness on the man and the dog. They came to rest in the shelter of one of the thousands of hummocks, and Polaris realized, with a chill at his stout heart, that their march had advanced them a bare score of miles from their last stopping place, when they should have covered at least twice that distance. From her nestling place beneath the heap of furs on the sledge he gently aroused Rose Emer. The girl rode most of the weary miles in light and fitful slumbers, drowsy with the cold, and her brain at times benumbed by the prospect, now nearer and nearer, of almost certain disaster--a contingency which the man would not admit.